Niki: The Making of a Cenobite
by SarahFromHell
Summary: A troubled young woman learns some things about pleasure. TRIGGER WARNING for extreme violence, including sexual violence. Slightly AU in some of the Cenobites' descriptions.
1. Familiar

**A/N: To all my Cruel Intentions fans, I'm really sorry for putting "Lovestory" on hiatus for so long. It's just been difficult for me because it's essentially, well, a love story, which will probably have a happy ending, and right now I'm just not in a place psychologically where I can write that kind of thing.**

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The chains, the darkness...they are familiar to her.

They are not familiar to Niki from real life, but they are familiar nonetheless. They're common enough in the horror movies she watches, late at night desperate to get to sleep, the movies about girls her age who get kidnapped by the serial killer, the evil cult leader, the man in the mask. He usually has a room he takes them to, a basement hideaway, no real furniture expect for the torturer's medieval dungeon implements. Deep laughter and frantic bargaining—I have money, my father's the mayor, don't do this please you're not really like this—followed by screams. They always scream when the blood starts to flow. Not a second before or after. Afterwards, quiet sobbing.

Niki would drift off to that sound, lying on her back on her twin bed, her body spread out in front of her like a slab of meat.


	2. Destroyed

The walls of her familiar room have been destroyed, have fallen down like toy blocks, replaced by a light that is not the sun, a sick light, a light that crawls. And then the darkness. The rest of her room is still there, even though everything beyond it is black. The bed with her laptop on the bedside table right next to it, for her to watch movies on. The ratty hand-me-down sofa. Her guitar, which she used to write songs on, before she couldn't do it anymore. It sits on the sofa, two strings broken. She hasn't used the sofa that much these days either, it's mostly for when friends come over. But Niki isn't looking at any of that, she's looking at the figures which have emerged from the darkness, which stand out against it in sharp relief.

The man, much taller than her and forbidding, encased in leather robes which make Niki think of a butcher's apron, that same facility with blood and dead flesh. His head is covered in nails, no, pins, inserted on a grid in precise intervals, like an acupuncture session gone wrong. Electricity seems to shiver between them. His nipples are exposed and bleeding. The effect is erotic. The eroticism of it terrifies her, it's a foretaste of what they probably want.

The woman, her leather butcher's robes cut open at the stomach, a metal cage around her neck holding the bleeding wound at her throat open, above it an expressionless bald doll's head with sunken eyes. Her robe is cut open again at the crotch, revealing blood. Not normal blood. Something was done to her down there.

The...the thing. Impossible to tell its gender, it's too scarred. Its whole body is nothing but a mass of scars: burn scars, scars from cutting, scars from...something. Its head is an eyeless mass of dead flesh. The only human-looking thing about it is the mouth, its teeth endlessly chattering. When she stares too long she thinks she can hear it talking, whispering things she can't decipher.

The...other thing. Its body encased in leather like the others. Its head pure light.

"Who are you?"

No answer.

"What do you want?"

"Your pain," the man says.

"Your pleasure," the woman adds.

Niki tries to run. She gets less than a foot away. A hooked chain flies out at her from nowhere and sinks itself deep into her side. It starts dragging her towards them, slowly. The pain is excruciating. Then another chain appears. This one sinks into her inner thigh. She screams.

An incongruous thought comes to her, in the midst of the pain: _They look cool._ The man and the woman at least, the ones with genders and faces. They look like some of the people she used to see at the Goth nightclub, after going to normal clubs full of happy party people had become too painful, but before she'd given up and stopped going out entirely. Devotees of leather and extreme body modification. They look like the type of people she'd want to compliment on their outfits if she saw them on the street, maybe even try to hit on if she saw them at the club.

Another chain hooks into her shoulder, and there is no more room for stray thought.

They are going to tear her apart. She can feel the chains pulling at her in three directions. She is going to die, right here, in a way more bloody and painful than she ever imagined possible. She is going to die! Niki wants to feel relief. Instead she feels the all-consuming blind terror of an animal in a trap.

And yet, on some level, she _is_ relieved. She is less terrified of these beings than she once was of her father.

"Did you really think we weren't going to rape you?" the woman says. She curls her lips upward in the barest hint of a smile.

Two more chains fly out at Niki, so fast she can barely see them. One has a multi-pronged hook on the end that rips her pants off her. The other has a large chrome cylinder on the end, too large. It plunges inside her. She screams again, then starts to sob.

"Is this...what you meant...by pleasure?" Niki can only gasp the words out, in between the rhythmic thumps of the cylinder within her, its sharp jolts of internal pain. She's coming, against her will. She wants to throw up. She has already, she can taste the vomit in her mouth and feel it dripping from her chin. She wants to throw up again.

The motion stops.

"This is only a start," the man says. "Come with us, and you will know pleasure beyond your current comprehension."

She knows they are probably lying. And yet... _I've read self-help books, gone on too many internet dates to count, tried four different religions plus atheism, two illegal psychadelics, went through three talk therapists and five or six legally prescribed antidepressant drugs. I'm running out of things to try._

If she refuses to come with them, they might leave. If they leave, she will be safe. She will remain in her safe room where no one touches her and it is completely silent.

"All right," she says. "I'll go with you."

The motion, the pain, starts up again. The rest of her room crumbles into gray ash. She is dragged by the chains through the corridors of an ever-shifting labyrinth, or is that a hallucination?

Semi-random words and melody flit through her brain, a snatch of a song she used to dance to at the Goth club. _Get on your knees...you won't survive the night..._

"Oh, but you _will_ survive," the man says. "We have an eternity to know your flesh."


	3. Agony

It is agony, pure agony. They take what they want from her, again and again. They tear her apart with hooked chains, cut her up with long curved knives. They peel her skin from her body, then burn the naked flesh underneath. She is slowly taken apart and then reassembled into something resembling her original shape, so they can start the game all over again. There are no mirrors here but she can feel the location of the scars they've left on her, the ridges and the burnt patches.

The one with the pins on his head took something else, too. He knelt down before her broken body, her body made hideous by torture, and brought her to orgasm with his tongue. She was ashamed for a moment that she enjoyed it so much. And then all shame flew from her mind, no room for shame in this place, and she pulled his head hard against her and kept it there. She drove the pins further into him, wondering if he felt the same pain in his head that she was feeling in her thighs. Later the woman came, and she wanted to plunge her hands into the wound in the woman's throat and the wound between her legs, plunge them in and grasp tight. She had not known she was capable of such lust, such violence. But the woman was more brutal than the man, she merely raised a finger and summoned two millstones to crush her, and watched without a word as her flesh was once again destroyed.


	4. Former Life

In her former life, deprived of human touch, she would sometimes walk into the kitchen and touch the walls, to convince herself that the world around her was not an illusion. It still felt like an illusion: to others a kitchen, only she knew it was a torture chamber. She used to hack away at her forearms with not-sharp-enough knives, hold her hand above the boiling water for pasta and fail to plunge it in, pour antifreeze into a paper cup and sit staring at it for an hour before finally throwing it away, a losing battle with her body's impulses. Her body wanted to be free from pain and mutilation, and above all to keep on living. What her body wanted was not the same as what she wanted. Meanwhile winter turned to summer and back again as she put her body through its endless robotic paces: shower, work, laundry, bills.

When her torturers don't appear, she is free to explore the labyrinth that is her new home. Its alien geometries inspire no horror. The labyrinth, at least, feels real to her.


	5. The Wire Twins

Her favorites are the ones she's nicknamed (for lack of a better name; no one but her has names here, and sometimes she also forgets hers) the Wire Twins. They wind in and out of each other as they torture her, wrap wires around her flesh which cut her until she's nothing but shreds, not even a finger or toe recognizable. And still feeling the pain, all of it; how is that even possible? They are Siamese, sometimes one person, sometimes two, depending on whim. The wires they use on her are the same ones that bind them together, they cut into the twins' flesh as well, pulling at their mouths, ripping out teeth which the twins pick up and put back into each other again, giggling. She envies them their connectedness, their twin-ness. They seem to know when their arrival will cause her the most pain, when she's desperate for anything resembling normalcy they stay away, they seem to know that at such times their presence would serve as a source of hope, a reminder that relationships of some sort are still possible. When she's thinking about her ex-boyfriend, her ex-friends, picturing them living normal lives without her, that's when they come. _One more thing I can't have._ Her envy of them is part of the torture, then. Of course it is. Did she think that the torture would be only physical? Yes she did, when she first came here. When she knew, all the time, that her name was Niki. How long ago that seems.

The Wire Twins rarely speak, but once she asked them a question and they responded. "Does it hurt when the wires rip at you?" she asked them.

"Yes."


	6. Intuition

The next time her torturers leave her alone, she doesn't bother to wander the halls of the labyrinth. Instead she plops down on the floor and begins to tear at her own flesh. Her intuition was right: it isn't long before they're back again.


	7. Friends

"I'm sorry, Niki," her best friend had said. "I just can't handle being your friend anymore."

"What? Why?"

"I just can't handle it. I'm sorry."

"Look, I know I haven't been the easiest person to be friends with. I know it scares you when I get suicidal, and it's not fair for me to lay all my problems on you, I know that. But I can talk about it less, I can not talk about it at all, I can...you know that I won't actually do it, right? I just feel that way sometimes. But I love you, I wouldn't do it."

"I'm sorry."

"Did your mom put you up to this? She always thought I was a bad influence. But you said she was a bitch and you didn't listen to anything she said. Me and you, we were going to be roommates together. You're not really like this, please don't do this. Please."

"I just can't handle being your friend anymore." The same phrase, repeated robotically over and over.


	8. Happy

She is being pierced in the stomach with a glowing-hot needle when it happens.

Past and future fall away: there is only the _now_. Soul and body are one entity, to the point where it is meaningless to think in terms of _soul_ : there is only the body. What her body feels is pain. And pain is a delight. She had felt it, a little bit, when she used to cut herself. But not in this overwhelming way, this tidal-wave rush of sensation she no longer fears but welcomes, _yes, all the way in. Take me. Do what you will. It doesn't hurt at all, it's ecstasy. Why did I ever fear it?_

She laughs as they put more needles in. She's happy.


	9. One of You

The Wire Twins are on her again. One of them is behind her, hands on her breasts playing with her nipples, the other is in front, long tongue stroking her clit. But not biting her, she realizes, not reaching in to molest her internal organs or tearing her apart with their wires. She finds she misses the sensation. She sees blood running down her legs, which the twin in between them laps up. Blood without pain. _Has it only been a month, then?_ And just as soon as she's thought that, another thought comes to her: _I still have periods. Does that mean I'm still human?_ But even as the words form in her mind she know that they're not true, that she has not eaten or peed or drank a single drink of water since she came here. She is not human, and is only mildly surprised to find that she is not disturbed by this fact. As if in response, her stomach churns and she vomits up more blood onto her chest and the hands of the twin behind her. The last of her humanity, she thinks, coming out.

She reaches up at the flesh above her, finds the wires. Pulls at them, hard. She knows they feel pain when the wires rip at them. There is blood on her right hand, theirs. The taste of their blood makes her come harder than the tongue on her clit did.

"Am I one of you now?"

"You are not our sister." She winces at the reminder that she is still lonely, still separate. And yet another part of herself rejoices in this fresh source of pain. "But in your suffering, you are one of us."

"Do I look like you?" She wants to know what she looks like. Not for the reason she used to want it, to see what remained of the old her, but to understand more fully this new thing she's become.

They bring her a mirror, scratched and kicked at but still bearing a very legible reflection. Her body is emaciated, her eyes sunken and dark, her skin scored all over with thousands of tiny cuts. She remembers how she got those cuts, every single one. She closes her eyes and immerses herself in a vision of pain and power. When she opens them she is clad in a tight black leather corset, and sharp metal shards—knives—poke out from her arms and her thighs and her palms and the lower part of her stomach. Anyone she touches, she will cut. Chains drip down her face where her hair once was.


	10. Time

More time passes, if time can be said to have any meaning in the Labyrinth. At any rate, many more games are played.


	11. The Cenobite

Somewhere deep inside her mind, a bell rings. Someone's opened the box.

A thrill runs through her, the thrill of new flesh. She has only to think the thought and she is there.

It's a ratty studio apartment, lingerie and heroin needles strewn about everywhere, a strong odor coming from the cat box, a woman crouched in the corner, in her forties but looking much older, cringing yet defiant. And wanting it, yes, oh so badly.

One of the beings that stands before her was once a young woman named Niki, who loved and felt heartbreak and despair because of it. She can't remember any of that. Now she has neither name nor human memories, and the only thing she feels is pleasure.

"Time to play," the Cenobite says.


End file.
